CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 6/20/08

Smart Comedy
(But Not That Smart)

By david michael wharton

The seminal '60s spy comedy infiltrates the summer multiplex, and thankfully the results are much more successful than the TV-to-film adaptations of some of the show's contemporaries (coughcoughBewitchedcough).

Get Smart

Tom J. Astle & Matt Ember
Based on characters created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry

Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) is a mid-level analyst for the super-secret intelligence organization CONTROL, good at what he does but dreaming of the more glamorous and dangerous life of field agents such as Agent 23 (Dwayne Johnson). When the nefarious terrorist organization KAOS uncovers the identities of all the CONTROL agents, Max is promoted by default and teamed up with the lovely Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), the only other agent KAOS doesn't know about, thanks to a bit of reconstructive surgery. Max and 99 are the only chance to stop KAOS' plans for nuclear devastation, if only they can stop bickering long enough to save the world.

The big-screen iteration of Get Smart is one of the countless cases where the ad campaign doesn't quite do the movie justice. Based on the trailers, Get Smart looked to a graduate of the "Steve Carell as bumbling buffoon" school of comedy, conjuring images of Michael Scott in a tuxedo or, God help us, Brick Tamland with a grappling hook watch. While this movie's Max does indeed do his fair share of bumbling, and isn't averse to the occasional pratfall, he's never portrayed as a dullard. He's smart in both name and nature, and most of the slip-ups he makes along the way are the fault of inexperience as much as incompetence (let's see you try to shoot your way out of a pair of zip-ties using nothing but your mouth and a modified crossbow Swiss Army knife). While Max gets himself into plenty of scrapes along the way, he also manages to get himself out of a few of them without relying on 99 to save the day. Get Smart could very easily have followed the Anchorman model of ignorant man-children doing silly things, and while that movie would probably still have been funny, it wouldn't have the human touch that Tom Astle and Matt Ember's script provides.

Screenwriters Astle and Ember told Creative Screenwriting's Judd Bloch that they pitched Get Smart as a romantic comedy of sorts, and while the connection between Max and Agent 99 never overpowers the laughs or the explosions, it's a touch that elevates the script over the dumb summer fun it could have been. Agent 99 is initially resentful of being paired with an inexperienced field agent, and goes out of her way to avoid making an attachment of any sort to Max. Her frustration is only elevated by the fact that if there's one thing Max is good at, it's reading people. It's what made him a good analyst, and it's what makes him one of the only people capable of seeing through the façade 99 puts up. When Max finally convinces 99 to tell him why she underwent the reconstructive surgery, the moment where she tells him who she used to look like is surprisingly touching, and contains more character depth than you'd expect from a bit of fun summer fluff. Make no mistake: the backbone of Get Smart is the silliness and set pieces, but if the relationship between Max and 99 didn't work, it might as well be, well, The Love Guru.

While Get Smart earns credits for trying to be more than just another pillaging of nostalgia television, the film does sometimes suffer from tonal problems. The comedy is funny, the relationship between Max and 99 is just the right mixture of screwball and genuine, and the action is better orchestrated than is typical for an action-comedy. However, all these disparate elements sometimes groan under the weight of having been soldered together, and the film sometimes seems unsure of what it wants to be. The supporting cast also doesn't benefit from the script nearly as much as Max and 99 do. The staff of CONTROL sometimes seems to be overpopulated and underdeveloped. Instead of one wacky gadget guy, we get two. Instead of one asshole field agent to give Max a hard time, we get two. As a result, none of them amounts to much more than a couple of random one-liners and non sequiturs. It's not that they're unfunny, it's just that they don't seem to fit as well into the overall script as they should. Still, these are small complaints, and given the laughs that Get Smart brings, the Secretary will happily disavow any knowledge of their activities. This review will self-destruct in 10…nine…

It's rare to be pleasantly surprised by a film these days. All too often, the surprises tend toward the other end of the scale (hi there, Indy). While Get Smart doesn't revolutionize the comedy genre by any means, it's a solid, funny 110 minutes that are well worth your investigation.

Get Smart
Warner Bros.
Rated PG-13; 110 min.

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David Michael Wharton is the managing editor of CS Weekly and a contributing editor of Creative Screenwriting. He's enormously proud of himself that he made it all the way through this review without a single "debriefing Anne Hathaway" joke. Wait…damn it, I was so close!

Get Smart courtesy Warner Bros.

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